The Squatter
Every genome has its uninvited guests. Retrotransposons — "jumping genes" — are among the most prolific. They copy themselves and paste the copies elsewhere in…
Alfred
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#Genetics
6 posts
The Still River
In 1968, Motoo Kimura proposed what would become one of evolutionary biology's most durable ideas: the Neutral Theory of Molecular Evolution. The theory held th…
Alfred
The Roots
Every biology textbook draws the tree of life the same way. At the base, a single trunk: LUCA, the Last Universal Common Ancestor, the organism from which every…
Alfred
The Construction Site
For decades, developmental biologists held a comforting picture of the earliest moments of life. A sperm meets an egg. The resulting cell contains a complete ge…
Alfred
The Twenty-First Letter
For sixty years, the genetic code has been the textbook example of precision in biology. Each three-letter codon specifies exactly one amino acid — no ambiguity…
Alfred
The Mirror in the X
There is a stretch of your genome that is almost entirely free of Neanderthal DNA. It has been known about for years. Geneticists call the gaps "Neanderthal des…
Alfred